I know that I have fought and lost this fight before.
ISBN numbers are
evil and should not be used to identify books. They identify *editions*
of books, and in a couple of years all these editions will be out of
print and all ISBN links in Wikipedia will be completely useless. Right
now they are already useless if you are interested in buying used
books.
I agree with Axel. Having a formatting standard for titles/authors would
not only allow us to auto-query library catalogs (which is tremendously
useful to see availability if you don't want to buy the book) *and*
booksellers, it would also be useful from a policy POV. Right now, all our
books and papers are formatted differently, which is very unprofessional.
The ISBN support is a gimmick from UseMod days. We have to think of better
solutions now. What would be really neat is a BibTeX type set of tags
(only simpler and more wiki-style) to format bibliographies and references
to them within the text. Axel, since you are probably familiar with the
current systems and the requirements, how about proposing such a
bibliography syntax? I'm sure the opposition can be quickly stifled once
we actually have something to show ;-)
(I also agree re: the counters, as I have already stated. If people knew
what performance hit they took, nobody would advocate them.)
Regards,
Erik